Tag: Civil War

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

It was flown by South Carolinians in the fight against the Redcoats during the Revolutionary War and was the first American flag to fly over the South. Best of all, the Moultrie Flag has the word “Liberty” written into the crescent moon, underscoring this key American value, so important for all peoples living in the South.

A suicide bomber with a concealed weapon detonated his payload during Friday prayers at the Ali b. Abi Talib Mosque in Qadif, a suburb of the major Shiite city of Qatif in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

When the people of the Donetsk area protested imposed changes, Kyiv launched an “anti-terrorist” operation against them. I saw firsthand these “terrorists,” who had decided to build something different from the oligarchic regime. Theirs is an enormous and difficult task.

In 1865, former slaves first heard the broken promise that they would receive “40 acres and a mule” to start their new lives. Now, 150 years later, the movement seeking compensation and healing for the slaves’ descendants is coming back to life.

NATO encroachment, stinging sanctions and civil war at the border. Political economist Jeffrey Sommers, an expert on the evolution of the former Soviet states, carefully describes the impinging economic and geographic forces shaping decision-making by Moscow’s elite.

President Obama’s instincts about Iraq and Syria have been sound from the beginning: Greater U.S. engagement probably cannot make things better but certainly can make them worse, both for the people of the region and for our national interests.

Already in the past week and a half, many assertions are becoming commonplace in the inside-the-Beltway echo chamber about Iraq’s current crisis that are poorly grounded in knowledge of the country. Here are some sudden truisms that should be rethought.

Militants seized the Iraqi city of Tikrit on Wednesday but security forces thwarted an assault on Samarra, as a lightning jihadist offensive launched in the country’s second largest city, Mosul, swept closer to Baghdad.

Memorial Day is a peculiarly appropriate holiday for our times. Its origins lie in the Civil War, which resulted from the failure of a deeply polarized political system to settle the question of slavery.

The rage and nihilism that come from the frustrations of American life are expressed through violence. Our armed vigilantes and renegade gunmen are symptoms of a nation in terminal decline. To resist, we must build a revolutionary consciousness. Without one, random murder will become our national sport.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin warned that Ukraine is on the verge of civil war, the Kremlin said Wednesday, after the Kiev government sent in troops against pro-Moscow separatists in the east of the country.

Increasingly, the unitary status of states is being called into question. Civil war, violence, and internecine struggles of various sorts are visibly on the rise. In many cases, state power seems to be draining away to no other state’s gain. So here’s one question: Where exactly is power located on our planet right now?

A disturbingly high number of children have been killed in the conflict, and evidence emerges that the Syrian government has engaged in a protracted campaign of “disappearing” young men thought opposed to the Assad regime. A United Nations body described the practice as a crime against humanity.

How does Obama’s decision to delay a congressional vote on a military strike fit into the U.S. government’s overall mission there? Are American leaders simply interested in weakening the Syrian government through a prolonged civil war?

The Syrian president escaped death or injury when rebels launched a mortar attack on his convoy early Thursday. The incident suggests “the country’s crippling civil war is edging [its way] to its seat of power,” The Guardian reports.

As planetary temperatures rise, so does the likelihood of murder, rape and domestic violence, as well as civil war, ethnic bloodshed and invasion, the collapse of government and even the collapse of civilization, a new exhaustive study shows.

“As a journalist, no one tells you something because they like the look of your face, generally,” the Independent reporter told Truthdig in an exclusive interview. “They tell you to further their own interests or the interests of their party.”

In a sad farewell note to the country he spent a long time covering, reporter Patrick Cockburn describes how ordinary Syrians struggle to survive amid a seemingly interminable civil war stoked by foreign governments pursuing their own interests.

In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible “moderates” whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.

“The best hope for an end to the killing in Syria is for the United States and Russia to push both sides in the conflict to agree to a ceasefire in which each holds the territory it currently controls,” Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent.

Syrian state-run television Thursday reported that pro-government forces killed an American woman, a British citizen and an unidentified Westerner. The three were accused of fighting alongside the rebel opposition.

Gunmen killed an anti-terrorism policeman and his family in Baghdad on Saturday; kidnappers abducted eight policemen on a highway to Jordan and Syria; and attackers shot dead a Sunni cleric in the country’s Shiite-majority south.

After returning from his first diplomatic mission to Syria and reporting to the U.N. Security Council, envoy Lakhdar Brahimi confirmed that things are as bad as they seem, and he doesn’t currently see a way forward.